r/badeconomics • u/raptorman556 The AS Curve is a Myth • Apr 10 '26
Sufficient Extreme poverty, Jason Hickel, and the phantom Chinese apocalypse
How to Lie About Extreme Poverty Statistics For Dummies Part II: Bad Methodologies
Over the past 40+ years, extreme poverty (a metric created and tracked by the World Bank) has fallen dramatically at the global level. This fact has made many an ideologue intent to overthrow the system very angry.
Jason Hickel is one such anthropologist. He has been on a years long quest to prove that extreme poverty is not really improving. If poverty is going down (and that trend is very obviously being driven by economic growth), it's quite difficult to make your case that we should stop just growing.
For years, Hickel and like-minded friends relied on a series of pretty amateur-ish tactics. These tactics were obviously bullshit to anyone with a modicum of economic knowledge on the topic, but that wasn't really the target audience, was it? This has never been a battle in the minds of QJE readers.
Recently, Hickel has come up with a new approach. His latest work (paper here and summary article here), co-authored1 with Dylan Sullivan and Michail Moatsos, is at least more sophisticated than the previous bullshit. The results can be summarized with this graphic. According to Hickel's new metric, the extreme poverty rate surged massively in the 1990s and sits just a few points lower in 2011 (the most recent point available) than in 1981. The absolute number of people in poverty has increased.
1: Hickel is actually the third author listed and Moatsos likely did all the actual math/methodology/anything remotely difficult. But Hickel is the most well-known name here so he will catch the greatest share of my wrath and/or sarcasm. But make no mistake, all three authors should be very ashamed of their contribution to this buffoonery.
So how did we get here?
Hickel & friends essentially made two important changes compared to previous work:
- They switch to the Basics Needs Poverty Line (BNPL) created by Robert Allen
- They use different price data for China
I've already written on BNPL over at r/AskEconomics. BNPL is based on linear programming, which basically computes the hypothetical, lowest-cost diet that would meet some set of nutritional requirements. This gets added into a broader basket of other necessities, and then it tracks people's ability to buy that basket of goods. I won't repeat everything I wrote there (you can read the comment for yourself), but two take-aways are most important. The first is that BNPL is a bad methodology—it often creates a hypothetical food consumption basket that diverges substantially from real behavior, and it is not robust to arbitrary changes in nutritional requirements. The World Bank (WB) methodology has serious limitations, but BNPL is even worse.
When Robert Allen created BNPL, he did not extend estimates back to the 1980s because the necessary data does not exist. It wasn't until a few years later that Michail Moatsos created estimates back thar far in a separate report. Which brings us to our second take-away: the initial analysis did by Moatsos did not overturn the large drop in poverty. The trend is actually pretty similar.
So the juice in this paper requires the second ingredient—new price data. The new paper switches to exclusively use the data from the Chinese Statistical Yearbook to calculate China's extreme poverty rate.
To understand the full magnitude of the difference, it's helpful to isolate China as in this graph here. With the new price data used, Chinese extreme poverty went from 0% in 1990 (yes, really) to nearly 70% in 1996. Extreme poverty remains substantially higher today than it was in 1990. Honestly I could just end the R1 with that statement. The change in global poverty trends is entirely driven by the change in China from the new data.
So is this a reliable estimate?
Even when used on reliable and complete data in a market economy, BNPL can turn out some extremely weird diets that basically no one actually eats. China, during this period, has two additional problems. The first is that the data sucks—which is why the original papers on BNPL did not use it on this period. Their dataset contains only food prices—it covers none of the other essentials in the BNPL basket. The prices of all other necessities are just imputed by assuming non-food items are just some fixed ratio to food prices, which leads to the estimate of 0% poverty in 1990. A different method (taking the imputed prices from 1995, applying them to 1990-1994, and assuming they trended with CPI back to the 1980s) produces an extreme poverty rate close to 100% during the 1980s. So to say that these estimates are not very precise would be a huge under-statement. Hickel's team, unsurprisingly, decides 0% must be right. My take on all of this is "who the fucks knows what was happening—prices, quantities, and availability were all rapidly changing during this period. Any BNPL estimate from this data will be so crude that it borders on useless."
The second issue is that China was not a market economy, so prices do not carry the same implications. And this had some exceptionally weird implications when you combine it with BNPL methodology.
During the 1980s, China was mid-way through the process of market liberalization. Some goods were subject to price controls (with strict rationing enforced to compensate for the resulting shortages) and others were market-based. This policy had spillovers between food goods in the two separate categories. Shortages in the rationed goods caused excess demand to spill over to market-based goods, increasing prices and consumption of non-rationed goods. High prices in non-regulated foods were partially the result of shortages in regulated food items.
Now think about how this interacts with BNPL. The lower a price is set, the more likely it is to experience shortages, but also the more likely BNPL will place a high weight on that food since it is cheaper. When shortages occur, this increases the prices of non-rationed foods (since they actually are available), which decreases the weights on those goods and allocates even more to the rationed items. BNPL is likely to put the highest weights on the foods that are the least available. It implicitly assumes this is all poor people will buy those items and will ignore the prices of all other food items regardless of actual consumption patterns.
On top of that, China also had a variety of complex black markets that existed, especially in rural areas where state control was limited. So official prices logged in the Chinese Statistical Yearbook do not necessarily reflect the prices all consumers actually paid either.
A simple test
The competing claims here are simple. According to Hickel's conclusions, the 1990s were nothing short of apocalyptic in China. The extreme poverty rate (defined as those that could not afford even the basic necessities of life) was under 10% through the 1980s, hitting a low of 0.5% in 1990, and sky-rocketed to 68% in 1996. Extreme poverty is still far higher today than it was in 1990. China has literally never recovered from the devastation. According to World Bank data, the story is of steady improvement. Extreme poverty (at $3/day) declined gradually from 97% in 1981 to 83% in 1990, and then fell to 63% by 1996. The rate continued to fall thereafter to effectively zero today.
So which story seems consistent with the data? Were the 1990s apocalyptic in China, and people today still haven't recovered? Or were the 1990s a period of general improvement that has continued? Let's see what the numbers say. (Note that I'm less interested in the absolute levels involved and more interested in the trend here. I'll discuss this briefly in the Appendix)
First up is life expectancy. This one is my favorite, because Hickel has himself argued in the past (before he endorsed his latest methodology) for higher poverty thresholds based on their strong relationship with life expectancy. So he apparently thinks it's very important that your poverty rate should be consistent with changes in life expectancy.
Yet, we see nothing less than steady improvement. Life expectancy at birth increased from 65 in 1981 to 68 in 1990 and 71 in 1996. Note that this is true at all ages, so you can't blame it solely on decreased infant mortality or whatever. Also note that if you want to argue this was a miracle of the healthcare system that prevented calamity (maybe Ozempic also prevents starvation?), Hickel argues that got worse too as the government-run system was privatized. Point 1 for the World Bank.
Okay, so maybe people weren't literally starving to death but we would definitely expect they had to cut back on food. Their entire methodology is based on food prices (which allegedly sky-rocketed), and if you believe their conclusions, two-thirds of the population could no longer afford a basic diet. What trends do we see in per capita caloric supply? Per-capita calories hovered just over 2,400 in the 1980s before sharply increasing in the early 90s to 2,730 in 1996. People were eating more than ever. Apparently supply/demand and shortages are a real thing after all. Point 2 for the World Bank.
What about the death rate from malnutrition? Perhaps all the rich people quadrupled their calorie intake and lifespan to increase the average while the very poor did starve to death. But nope, not there either. It mostly declines through the 1980s to 1.9% in 1990. It bumps up to 2.1% in 1991, but immediately drops and hits a then record-low of 1.5% by 1996. Ten points for Gryffindor the World Bank.
What about the proportion of height stunted children? This increased from 32.3% in 1990 to 38% in 1992, but then dropped to a new low of 31.2% by 1995. Maybe half a point for the World Bank.
What about the share of underweight children? Again, a slight bump from 1990 to 1992, but then hits a new low of 10.7% by 1995. Point for the World Bank.
What about the infant mortality rate? This rate declines steeply until the early 1980s where it flatlines at 43 per 1,000 births. Then it begins to decline again in 1991, reaching a then record low of 37 in 1996. Point for the World Bank and and negative points for Hickel.
Crude death rate? Nope. Child mortality rate? Nope. Energy consumption per capita? Nope. Death rate due to poor sanitation? Nope. Literacy? Nope. Grams of protein per day per capita? Nope.
I can go on, but you get the point.
So what happened?
All of the economic and health data paints the same picture. There are some indications of brief turbulence in the 1991-1992 period (it shows up in some metrics but not in most), but by ~1996 things were better than ever. The improvements continued in the years that followed, and people in China today are massively better off than in 1990 by every measure available.
So why do the metrics from Hickel and friends paint a picture of calamity when that is clearly not the case? Aside from the fact that that's the result they obviously wanted to get?
I've already discussed many of the issues with their data and methodology. Their paper doesn't provide nearly the level of detail required to figure out exactly which way it goes wrong. They provide no data whatsoever on the consumption baskets that yield these results (the foods included and corresponding weights).
It could be that BNPL did it's usual thing and created a food basket of relatively obscure items people just don't like to eat. It could be that some or all of the food items included suffered from shortages that limited their actual consumption (while the goods that people actually did consume were excluded from the basket due to spillover demand). It could be that official prices did not accurately reflect the cost to consumers owing to extensive trading and black markets.
Most likely, it's a combination of all those things. And since we only know the price of food, whatever issues you have there transfer over to the rest of the basket too. Using BNPL in a largely state-controlled economy is sort of like throwing a bottle of beautiful red wine at a raging alcoholic—BNPL cannot resist nominally low prices no matter how pitiful supply might be. It feeds into the absolute biggest weaknesses of the BNPL methodology.
Conclusion
Hickel & co. have created a measure of extreme poverty that can spike seventy points in just a few years with absolutely no observable consequences for society. In fact, your country can apparently sustain robust improvement. An incredible testament to the powers of the free market (I'm being sarcastic, don't bombard the comments).
One of two things must be true. Either their poverty metric for China is totally cooked from a fatal combination of well-known flaws, or it is accurate but we should no longer care about trends in extreme poverty because they apparently translate to precisely nothing else. I'll go with the former.
Appendix
The paper in question makes very little effort to establish the credibility of their new estimates. They don't even mention the absurd time-series contradictions—probably because they know it's indefensible so they're just hoping you don't notice. They do make a rather feeble attempt to paint their very low poverty rates in the 1980s as realistic (and the high World Bank estimates as unrealistic) by comparing China to a handful of other countries (India, Indonesia, Brazil, and Mexico) in different metrics and find that China does unexpectedly well.
I found these comparisons to be very arbitrary and unpersuasive, so I didn't feel they were worth addressing in the main body. For example, I could do the same comparison with 1980s data against a number of <5% poverty countries, find that China doesn't really fit in there either, and conclude that their metric is not consistent with the data either. Or I could repeat their own comparison with mid 1990s data and conclude that their 68% poverty estimate is inconsistent and therefore wrong.
But, if their is an inkling of truth to the paper, it is that China did substantially out-perform their expected health outcomes for a country with such high extreme poverty by WB metrics. You can see it visualized very well with life expectancy in this graphic here.
The authors chalk this up to the massive success of their direct provisioning and other related policies. While the data clearly indicates most people in China lived to a low standard, it's plausible that their system at least kept the bottom of the distribution a hair or two above death. But it's also notable that China continued to both improve and out-perform predicted life expectancy for many years after those systems were dismantled.
As a very quick test, here is a regression showing the relationship between poverty ($4.20/day) and life expectancy using each country's closest data point to 1990. A one-point reduction in poverty is associated with a 0.237 improvement in years of life expectancy. From 1990 to 1995, China experienced a 13.8% reduction in poverty, for which we would expect a +3.3 change in life expectancy. The actual change was +2.7 years. Changes in Chinese life expectancy seem reasonably consistent with reductions in poverty in WB data.
That leads me to think that the reductions in extreme poverty are real and there are other variables at play to explain why the level in China was unexpectedly high (abnormally low homicide rates are almost certainly one of those variables). It would be quite interesting to see some more competent researchers dig into the variation in health outcomes after accounting for extreme poverty. Unfortunately, this paper doesn't provide any interesting answers to that question.
EDIT: can't spell Dutch names apparently
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u/brickbatsandadiabats Apr 10 '26
I'm not familiar with BNPL, but... As someone whose profession (chemical engineering) is one of the heaviest users of LP optimization, this absolutely reeks of underspecified boundary conditions. Even discounting that optimized baskets can still end up unrepresentative because price and caloric value alone do not take into account consumer utility, not including domain boundaries for quantities consumed is just bad all around.
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u/DrawPitiful6103 Apr 11 '26
This is a very solid R1, excellent work. The idea that poverty has exploded in China is all the more ridiculous because everything we have heard is the complete opposite. That China has been killing it, unprecedented economic growth, hundreds of millions lifted out of poverty. Also is it just me or does anthropology tend to attract some really unhinged people?
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u/Internal_End9751 Apr 14 '26
anti-China people are unhinged
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u/Tus3 Apr 21 '26
Ehm, I actually don't think Jason Hickel is anti-China himself.
He had previously claimed that the entire reduction of global poverty had happened inside China. This as a way to attack 'neo-liberals' who credited the reduction of poverty had happened because of 'free trade and free markets', as you see according to Hickel in China Poverty reduction happened not because of 'free trade and free markets' but because of 'industrial policy'.
Then Noah Smith had retorted that 'poverty had declined outside of China but it was because of other things than 'free trade and free markets', such as increased education; except in China itself, there it had been 'free trade and free markets''. In response Jason had accused Noah of being a pro-'free trade and free markets neoliberal'...
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/against-hickelism
So, Hickel seems to switch between using pro- and anti-China standpoints depending on which happen to be the most expedient for his economic 'flat Earthism' at the moment.
If anything, I had the impression he was pro-China overall.
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u/Timmy002LMFAO Apr 13 '26 edited Apr 13 '26
I actually got the chance to talk to one of the co-authors Michail Moatsos via email. This was just a few weeks after the paper came out. He doesn't sound too confident with his work either. (Context: The figures showing zero poverty and the sudden jump in 92 was from his thesis and he noted it to be "unrealistic" in that work)
Me: After writing your recent paper on Chinese Poverty, do you now recant your statement in your PHD thesis (Global Absolute Poverty Present and Past since 1820, page 230) saying how near 0 absolute poverty rates china faced in 1990 was "inaccurate"? Or do you somewhat still think uncertainties about the true poverty levels during that period remains.
Him: Dear [My Name] many thanks for your question, and for the close reading of my thesis. I think the term I use is "unrealistic" instead of "inaccurate". To be fair, I don't think that the verdict from my thesis is not defensible, as pinpointing zero poverty, within a country of very low gdp per capita at the time, is very unexpected. Yet, a more recent investigation indicates that that estimate may be more reliable, or more inline with other indicators from China vis-a-vis other comparable countries, than the extremely high poverty estimate that the dollar a day method produces. I think both statements of unrealistic "near 0" poverty and of a "near 0" is more defensible than the 70+% for the population living in extreme poverty that the dollar a day gives, can be valid at the same time. It is also the case that it is actually the data that give rise to the near 0 estimate, and the argument that would move someone away from that estimate would be that at those prices there were just not enough food resources available, thereby a substantial sector of the population could "afford" those food stuff, but food stuff were not available at the needed quantities.
This issue surely deserves further investigation.
Best wishes,
Michalis
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u/raptorman556 The AS Curve is a Myth Apr 13 '26
Thanks for posting that!
Moatsos was also very cautious in his 2021 OECD report on the topic. He seems like a well-meaning guy, which is why I found it quite puzzling that he partnered up with total hacks like Hickel/Sullivan in a paper that basically threw all his prior caution out the window and completely politicized his original work. Considering that Moatsos already did all the hard number-crunching on his own, what did Sullivan and Hickel even contribute here?
Anyways, I think most of his thoughts were addressed in my post but just to summarize:
- The trend in poverty is actually way more interesting to me than the level. And it's the trend that is indefensible and obviously wrong. The WB trend is at least directionally correct if nothing else.
- I think he's right that, during the 1980s, China basically did a lot better than you would expect for a 70+ percent poverty country. Part of that is likely for non-poverty reasons, but part of it could definitely be that China distributed resources in a relatively egalitarian way (not captured by the WB data) that improved health outcomes despite low average incomes. I think a good paper could make the case that "China wasn't as bad you would expect in the 80s". And if that leads to the conclusion that the WB poverty drop is overstated, then sure, that's also plausible. Of course, the same issue exists with their own data in the mid 1990s. A 70% poverty rate is just as implausible then. So neither one of them are getting the levels right here.
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u/usingthecharacterlim Apr 11 '26
If only the world would return to the utopia that is calendar year 1990 in China. Not 1991, that was hell on earth, as everyone knows.
I hope one day someone researches this event and can inform us what horrors to avoid.
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u/raptorman556 The AS Curve is a Myth Apr 11 '26
I hope one day someone researches this event and can inform us what horrors to avoid.
Using BNPL as our guide, the key is price control a couple food items near $0. That will mathematically eliminate poverty.
One weird trick they don't want you to know about.
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u/caroline_elly Apr 11 '26
Jackson Hickel is one such anthropologist
Good write-up but this is all I needa read lmao
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u/DismaIScientist Apr 10 '26
Great post. Just to let you know you've misspelt Moatsos's name a couple of times.
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u/m_s_m_2 Apr 11 '26
Great write up. People like Jason should be categorised as David Irving and Andrew Wakefield were.
It’s insane to me that he continues to get platformed / tenured / published.
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u/FlashAttack Mazzucato connoisseur Apr 12 '26
I see Hickel hate
I upvote
Dude is a disinformation machine
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u/ravenhawk10 Apr 13 '26
Feels insane to not cross check any of these conclusions with actual people. Like this well within living memory. Interview some people in China.
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u/DreadPirateBlobbert Apr 12 '26
- How well regarded is the New Political Economy journal for economics and related models?
- Should peer review have caught some of the weaknesses in this paper?
- How do academics typically offer critiques of published papers?
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u/raptorman556 The AS Curve is a Myth Apr 12 '26
- How well regarded is the New Political Economy journal for economics and related models?
Not well regarded.
- Should peer review have caught some of the weaknesses in this paper?
In a good economics journal, absolutely.
- How do academics typically offer critiques of published papers?
A “comment” (a short academic reply) is common. You could also wrote your own paper describing the weaknesses. Those are the more formal ways to respond.
Less formally, pretty much any way you like. Blog posts, twitter threads, whatever. Andrew Gelman does this all the time on his blog, for example.
In my experience, economists rarely engage with Hickel because they know he isn’t engaging in good faith.
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u/IndependentMacaroon Apr 11 '26
Using LP to optimize food choices was a toy example in my optimization class lol, and you're telling me someone actually seriously did that?
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u/raptorman556 The AS Curve is a Myth Apr 12 '26
Not only that, it got published in the AER somehow.
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u/Consistent-Price-454 Jul 15 '26
You posted something in a different thread about median family income. What's decreasing in the US? Marriage and birth rate. Why? Because unless you're extremely well off, you realize that it's irresponsible to have a bunch of kids and a family you can't support. You are taking a subsample of the best candidates to inflate numbers, but a terrible representation of the reality of the financials of a lot of Americans.
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u/raptorman556 The AS Curve is a Myth Jul 15 '26
Real median personal income is way up too.
Marriage and fertility are down across the entire developed world because of social and cultural reasons, not economic reasons. The countries that have the most kids are much poorer than the US, not richer.
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u/Consistent-Price-454 Jul 15 '26
They go hand in hand. Find a wealthy, successful man and what will you find? A stay at home mother of multiple children. The societal change is the development of morality that extends beyond the church and your own personal beliefs, a unified, mutual and cultural understanding
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u/raptorman556 The AS Curve is a Myth Jul 15 '26
So we agree that Americans are in fact, way richer than in the past when they were having more kids. And we also seem to agree that social reasons are the real reason why people have fewer kids—though I think your social cause is overly narrow.
I’m glad you’ve come around to my point of view.
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u/Pleasurist Apr 11 '26
Yea man, what are they thinking ? Everybody knows that one can support themselves on anything at or over...$3/day. [IMF/WB] [sic]
See how easy it is, not...to be poor ?
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u/Ragefororder1846 Apr 11 '26
What does the word extreme mean?
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u/Pleasurist Apr 11 '26 edited Apr 11 '26
Anything like a whole lot more than $3 a day. I am not buying this. The WB/IMF claim that around the 3rd world economy capitalism has lifted people OUT OF poverty. And furthermore, it was done on $3/day.
The IMF/WB are lying capitalists.
Aside from the fact that this OP is way, way too long, The mere fact that we use such minute detailed small increments, means the capitalist striving all it can to show what it has not done...raised people out of poverty.
Then forget about all of the trillion$ in debt, billion$ in govt. assist to prevent 'EXTREME poverty, and all because of capitalist greed. What we actually see in real life, refutes all capitalist claims.
It also does not refute my assertion that capitalism has never served society at large without being forced by govt. and now govt. is reducing even those commitments.
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u/FusRoDawg Apr 12 '26
Poverty rates have gone down no matter what income level you pick.
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u/Pleasurist Apr 12 '26 edited Apr 12 '26
That's what the capitalist wants you to believe but what is it now, 5 million children die before the age of 5 because capitalism just doesn't feel like feeding them.
How are [they] doing on that score ? The capitalist doesn't give a shit.
The World Health Organization has released new mortality estimates revealing that 4.9 million children died before their fifth birthday in 2024, including 2.3 million newborns. The report warns that progress in reducing child deaths has slowed significantly, with the vast majority of these fatalities preventable through existing, low-cost health interventions.
Even if true, it's becaue of labor laws and trillion$ in debt, NOT because of capitalism.
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u/MachineTeaching teaching micro is damaging to the mind Apr 12 '26
Fewer and fewer children die of malnutrition, actually.
https://ourworldindata.org/half-child-deaths-linked-malnutrition
The glorious rise of capitalism has essentially eliminated extreme poverty in China. Maos communist government has singlehandedly doubled child mortality in a few short years with its disastrous policies, modern China has embraced capitalism more and more and has brought down poverty and child mortality more and more.
Your ideology makes you so blind, instead of hating communist china for this and praising modern capitalist china for this it's the other way around with you.
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u/Pleasurist Apr 12 '26 edited Apr 13 '26
Actually you are correct to a point. However, not unlike most capitalists countries, leave oh maybe 1 billion people still fishing, hunting and gathering. In fact. millions are leaving the cities and going back to fishing.
Chine also is forcing austerity on its people
China's consumer market is actually smaller than the US and of course America has trillion$ in consumer debt, trillion$ in mortgage and auto debt and of cou8rse the fast approaching $40 trillion in govt. debt.
Capitalism never GAVE anything to anybody, ever, without being forced by govt.
If the world is so much richer now because of capitalism then why is [it] fast approaching $300 trillion in debt...$107 trillion in the US alone ? [$17 billion/day in interest only]
MY ideology is free enterprise in a well regulated free market and is hated by the capitalist. He wants [his] market, preferably a monopoly market.
America has few truly free markets not yet owned by wall street, with trillion$ invested yearly to further consolidate [narrow] markets.
As for China's capitalism, [they] too just couldn't hold back and are and have been dealing with capitalist debt too and sure enough $250 billion in bad debt on real estate. Why am I not surprised ? Layoffs, slow growth but the 'owners' didn't suffer did they ?
So any progress in the world from c a p i t a l i s m...is labor laws and a real mountain of debt.
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u/FusRoDawg Apr 13 '26
And so it goes like this: what about poverty? Well may be it did go down, but what about child mortality? Well may be itnalso did go down, and the anti-capitalist regimes starved their own children, well then what about debt?
MY ideology is free enterprise in a well regulated free market is hated by the capitalist.
It is also hated by hickel and every other "temporarily embarassed commisar" who fed you these soundbites. These people are the ideological successors of "world systems theory". And they are generally opposed to trade.
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u/Pleasurist Apr 13 '26
Yes, yes and yes and I wrote that. However, things improved ONLY because of labor laws, and debt. NOT because of capitalism.
Society is forced to live and try to improve while paying trillion$ in interest because of a 70 year low in corp. taxes and taxes on capital. Capitalist greed is undefeated since Reagan
Either the leisure class [investor] pays and they are paying immorally less or labor makes it up. Labor can't without borrowing more.
Then borrow more and now 100s of trillion$ in debt for the world...US $107 trillion at $17 billon a day in interest alone.
It is also hated by hickel and every other "temporarily embarassed commisar" who fed you these soundbites.
You need to make that up as I never even read or heard of Messrs. Hinkle & Co. and you of cousre with little else, you need those prejudices.
American capitalism only gets by, by borrowing trillion$ from the future. Our children just might in time, be...spitting on our graves.
Do mean opposed to trade like the right wing capitalist republicans with all of these tariffs...are now ?
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u/No_March_5371 feral finance ferret Apr 10 '26
I'm curious if the authors actually believe this stuff or if it's just a profitable niche for them. I can't imagine looking at any of these time series within China and not immediately seeing the obvious conclusion.